Having You Tube at our fingertips online is such a great resource. You can see just about anything! Music, TV shows, people doing stupid things, and tons of how-to videos. Today’s post sends you over there to check out the video by Randy Comer, showing you how to fuse glass. This video provides some really cool information such as cutting glass, assembling it for a firing, a quick bit about pattern bars, using all the different components that were previously made to assemble a new piece and slumping that piece once it’s been fired. He also gets into why he would fire something more than once, which was after he fired a piece that was draped and then slumped to change the piece a bit. Randy is very good at conveying this information and I think you can get a lot from this. He doesn’t get into actual temperatures that he’s firing at or firing schedules, so I do recommend maybe checking out some other videos on You Tube to find out other information. But do remember that firing schedules for pieces do change and are not the same for every project.
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Do You Park Your Cross Stitch Thread? Try The Royal Roads Method
I have not done a lot of big cross stitch projects, but sometimes even with small projects it can be hard to decide exactly where to begin and how to work through the chart if you’re working with multiple colors. The general categories for the possible methods are known as cross country and parking.
Cross country means that you’re working one color at a time, moving around the chart (or the section of the chart you’re working on) until you’re done with that color. Parking means you’re working in a smaller section and doing all the colors in that area, “parking” the threads by leaving them attached to the canvas but out of the way while you finish each section.
Royal Rows is a specific way of parking named by Alison Royal, which is explored in detail on a post on Stitching Daily.
The idea is that you’re working one “tower” of stitches at a time (she uses a section of 10 stitches across by 20 down, but you can do whatever makes sense to you). You work all the stitches of a color at a time, starting at the top left and working your way down. When you’re done with a color you can park it where needed in the section below your current tower (known as the dungeon) or in the “east tower,” which is the section to the right.
There’s also a specific way of dealing with thread ends when you’re done with a color. This is a super simplified version (head to the blog post at Stitching Daily to get all the details) but the basic idea is that you’re working from left to right and top to bottom across the work, parking the threads in the next section when you’re done with them and systematically choosing which color to work with next.
The whole idea of parking is kind of overwhelming to me though I will admit that it makes a lot of sense. I guess I need to try it on a smallish big project and see how it goes. Do you use the parking method of cross stitch? I’d love to hear about it!
[Photo via Stitching Daily]